The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and other data processing systems, including hardware, software and processes. More particularly, the present invention pertains to a text output formatting system that uses pattern matching specified by a user to automatically apply HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tagging and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) style definitions for rendering in a browser based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) console.
Today, most programmers use an IDE when developing new code, particularly when using an Object Oriented Language (such as Java™). The output of such code is presented in a console pane in the IDE Graphical User Interface (GUI). This presented code is then examined by the programmer in order to help debug the source code. A problem arises for the programmer who is trying to correlate source code in an editor pane with displayed content in a console pane. The most common method for making such correlations is to add some meaningless symbols, such as a row of stars, to be output to the console pane. For example, two commands (to print the meaningless symbols) may bracket a block of meaningful source code in the editor pane. When the browser-supported console reads the source code from the editor pane, it will print out (in the console) the meaningless symbols before and after the output of the block of meaningful source code. However, this system of inserting such non-substantive code is clumsy, error prone, and time consuming. Furthermore, by displaying all text in the console using a same style/font/appearance, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the programmer to determine which displayed text correlates with which source code.